It is Sunday,
and my wife is standing in the bathroom doorway
reading my phone,
softly laughing
with the particular patience of a woman
who has accepted that the man she loves
is currently conducting unscheduled maintenance
in the engine room.
I am out of service,
but not, importantly,
out of the loop.
The house continues to report to me.
Cillian has gone quiet.
This is not peace.
Cillian-quiet is a system alert.
It means our tiny scientist
has developed a hypothesis
and, finding the peer-review process cumbersome,
has proceeded directly to human trials.
“Are you okay, bud?”
“Yeah! 🥰🙂↕️”
A pause.
New data arrives.
“No. 😭😭😭”
Science advances.
Emrys, meanwhile,
has discovered that Dad's earrings
are not earrings at all.
They are LEGO-compatible mounting points.
This is excellent news.
He is our mechanical engineer,
and there is infrastructure to expand.
A brick is attached.
Then another.
I remain seated in the engine room,
apparently now both a parent
and a load-bearing component
of the LEGO ecosystem.
My wife navigates all of this
with a softness I don't know how to properly describe.
Three little worlds
all needing something different,
all making noise in different directions,
and one husband temporarily parked
with the hood up.
She moves between us,
laughing, listening, helping,
absorbing a thousand tiny inputs
while somehow still making each of us feel
like ours reached her.
And among all of this
is Morrigan.
Tiny Morrigan.
Asleep in her swing.
The stereo plays
because silence, in this house,
would be cause for concern.
Her brothers engineer and experiment.
Her mother keeps the universe in orbit.
Her father provides technical support
from the maintenance bay.
And she simply watches—
when she is awake—
with those enormous new eyes,
quietly collecting data
on the strange little civilization
into which she has arrived.
Then, apparently satisfied
that nothing occurring here
requires divine intervention,
she sleeps.
Perhaps she learned us
before she ever met us.
Months spent tucked safely inside her mother,
listening to the muffled soundtrack
of this ridiculous little house.
Voices.
Footsteps.
Laughter.
Cillian conducting unauthorized research.
Emrys presumably searching for a suitable wrench.
Maybe this isn't chaos to her.
Maybe it's home.
And from the engine room
I can hear all of it.
My children building and discovering.
My wife laughing from the doorway.
Music filling the spaces between us.
Nothing is particularly peaceful.
Nothing is particularly orderly.
I have LEGO hanging from my ears.
And I cannot imagine
a more beautiful way
to spend a lazy Sunday
temporarily out of commission,
deeply involved,
listening to the little machine we've built together
happily, noisily,
run.